I think the biggest area of growth I’ve experienced since becoming a Vivero Fellow, aside from just general proficiency in a wide array of DH tools, is my project management and leadership skills. I ended up as the project manager and technical lead for the Georgia Dentel Project during my MAP this summer, and I feel like my time with Vivero prepared me well for that position, and was likely a contributing factor in getting me the spot on that MAP. On the side of areas of weakness for me as a Fellow, I feel like my weakest point, like many of the fellows who come into Vivero from the Humanities and Social Studies, is my coding skills and knowledge of coding languages. I’ve tried to develop some of those skills through working with CollectionBuilder and other static site generators, but I think they remain one of my weaker points. I also really always enjoy any learning process where I get to do research and find resources, especially if those resources can then be useful to others once I’ve compiled them. I think I’m really good at hunting up resources and finding information, and it’s really one of my favorite tasks.
Looking forward, I’d really like to develop my coding skills/knowledge of static sites further, as that process has a lot of transferable skill development in it. I’d like to specifically get more familiar with using git, as well as developing some fluency in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, to apply some of the tutorials I’ve gone through on my own time during academic breaks towards the creation of static sites. I’d also like to further develop my mentoring & teaching skills- all the fields that I’m considering going into would benefit from developing that. It’s also something that, while I’ve done it before and have a bit of experience with it, I think I’d benefit from more practice with. I think it’d be fun to do a workshop to teach folks how to create a barebones (Google Sheets-based) version of CollectionBuilder, something I feel a bit more comfortable with than the CSV version, which requires familiarity with Jekyll, some front-end coding skills, and a tad of Liquid knowledge. I’d probably start with reading up on pedagogical design models for teaching workshops and other such resources, then building off those. To build my skills with CollectionBuilder/static sites, I’d probably lean on the CollectionBuilder official documentation, Libby’s internal documentation, and Programming Historian tutorials on building Jekyll sites.
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